Just how creative?

lit-lorn-strait

Dear Geist,
I’m wondering what your thoughts are about the role of facts in an essay, both historically and currently, and how much truth matters in an essay. A recent piece (article? essay?) in The Atlantic critiquing a writer’s (John D’Agata) take on the essay form has a lot of writers in the States talking, so I would love to hear the Canadian perspective on these issues. Here is a related piece critiquing D’Agata's positions on art and the essay.
As a caveat, this email is true. I have not made any of this up.
—Aaron Gilbreath, Portland OR
Dear Aaron,
Thanks to the very nature of writing, we can expect a long life for the thorny question of how creative a writer can be in a work of creative non-fiction before it is no longer non-fiction. As you point out, John D’Agata and others argue that there are good writerly reasons to stretch, embellish, change and otherwise tweak the literal facts. We can all agree that to write a great essay, or even to tell a decent story at the dinner table, a writer must shape the source material. A real-life story or anecdote is a meaningless bore when reported exactly as it happened, so the writer or speaker selects telling details, omits irrelevant bits, shuffles the elements and/or exaggerates here and there, to enhance suspense and impact.
At Geist we check facts as thoroughly as we can, even in works of fiction and poetry. Publishers are responsible for the public record, a serious business considering that all writing posted online—true and spurious—proliferates instantly in a gazillion databases. And we’re keen to protect the credibility of our magazine and our writers. We don’t have a fixed list of acceptable and unacceptable deviations from the bare facts; we work with writers and manuscripts one by one to sort out apparent inaccuracies. As well as the shaping tweaks mentioned above, a writer may change a name or detail to protect someone vulnerable, or to ward off legal problems. If these edits don’t compromise the central concerns of the work, and if no deceit takes place, we are all right with them.
Some years ago John D’Agata wrote a magazine article/essay about a Las Vegas teenager’s death by suicide, and the larger implications of it. He pushed hard on the facts in his piece—too hard for the fact checker, Jim Fingal, who found seven errors of fact just in the first sentence. D’Agata declared that he had made those changes deliberately—for effect, and for the music of his sentences. In his view these revisions enhanced the piece, and were akin to the omissions, conflations, re-orderings and other adjustments routinely made in creative non-fiction. Fingal disagreed, arguing that shaping material is qualitatively different than introducing factual errors for aesthetic reasons.
We agree with Fingal. We aren’t convinced that D’Agata’s article would have lost its shimmer if he had kept the actual “eight heart attacks” instead of writing “four heart attacks,” or if he had revised “the moon only showing half of itself” in response to Fingal’s note that the moon was a fingernail that night, or if he had left out “parts of [the young man’s body] had been found a day later, sixty feet away,” which was uncorroborated, and which D’Agata said had “probably” come from someone who was “drunk or stoned or both,” but which he wanted to keep for ambience.
Our checkpoint is the unspoken agreement that a publisher makes with readers. They know that non-fiction writers arrange their material, but when inaccuracies come to light, the agreement is disrupted and the writer and/or publisher become untrustworthy. When a writer has good reasons to make such changes, it’s more ethical to go with “non-fiction novel,” “based on a true story” or similar wording.
A note to readers of this post: We recommend the articles in Aaron’s links above, and the book The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal (Norton, 2012), a rigorous, heated, sometimes nasty, always interesting exchange. And take a look at Respectful Recounting and Truth and Consequences, two related Advice for the Lit-Lorn posts.
—The Editors